The present invention relates to the field of dough processing, and more particularly to the field of machining a continuous dough sheet to provide a quantity of biscuits or crackers to a baking oven.
A primary objective of any dough machining process is to control the weight of the pieces being output to the baking oven that generally forms the succeeding step in an overall process.
The fundamental difficulty in controlling such processes lies in the interdependence of successive process steps. When, as is typical, a dough machining process includes a number of size reduction, lamination, and cutting steps, an adjustment in a processing variable at any point in the process will cause changes elsewhere in the system, necessitating further adjustment. The prior art depends primarily upon experienced operators to control such processes by "feel", resulting in considerable variation in piece weight at the process output. Automated process control in the prior art has been somewhat lacking, due to the interdepedence of process steps, but some efforts have been made to control individual portions of the process, as discussed below.
To date, however, the art has not succeeded in perfecting an integrated control system that can address a dough machining process as a whole. That need is filled by the present invention.